Art is a comfort for these displaced Lebanese kids

TYRE, Lebanon – As the old American school bus painted in a riot of colors pulls into a school yard in this city in south Lebanon, a dozen children are waiting, the youngest jumping up and down and clapping in excitement.

The former yellow bus, now covered in images of iconic film, music and comedy stars, is at the heart of an arts project that for a few hours a week whisks away children displaced by conflict to a place where they can be kids again.

Kassem Istanbouli, the founder of Tiro Association for the Arts, shouts out greetings as the youngsters clamber on and squeeze onto the padded metal seats.

“The purpose is that we want them to come to have joy and fun and to learn,” says Istanbouli, a Lebanese actor and theater director. “But the most important is that they can get out and forget the war for two hours.”

Istanbouli created the foundation in 2014 in the belief that art can help heal the wounds of war and unite people from across the country. The wounds in Lebanon are particularly deep – civil war raged here from 1975 to 1990, leaving parts of the country largely disconnected from each other. The country underwent two wars with neighboring Israel with regular cross-border fighting in between.

Tiro’s participants have included kids from towns across Lebanon as well as Syrian and other refugees in Lebanon.

On this day the children are from villages near the border with Israel, where the militant Iran-backed group Hezbollah and Israel have been fighting since the start of the war in Gaza. Acting in support of Hamas militants in Gaza, Hezbollah began attacking Israel to divert Israeli forces. And Israel retaliated. Originally confined to a relatively narrow range of border targets, fighting between Israel and Hezbollah now threatens to erupt in full-scale war.

In Lebanon, the U.N. says almost 100,000 people have been displaced from border villages while Israel says about 90,000 people have been displaced on its side by the fighting. In Israel, the government gives hotel accommodations and a daily stipend to those who need assistance.

For Lebanese families in the south, evacuation was voluntary. With no good options, many of the families stayed until the attacks made it impossible and then left to move in with relatives around the country or to go to schools turned into shelters.

Living in schoolrooms

The children that Tiro is picking up on this day now live in empty schoolrooms with their families after being displaced from villages near the Israeli border. But most of them don’t attend school. Lebanon is also undergoing an educational crisis linked to the economic crisis. Without government services, education was largely privatized.

Aid groups say one out of four children in Lebanon do not attend school. In the south, with its large numbers of displaced students, there are not enough teachers to hold regular classes for them. Many of the families don’t have regular internet or smart phones to access remote lessons.

One of the children living in the school, Ali Mohammad, says he was afraid of the airstrikes at first but says “day by day I got used to them.”

His favorite subjects are math and sports but asked what he wants to be when he finishes school, the slight 12-year-old with green-blue eyes says "a martyr" so he can fight to defend his country and go to paradise. “God willing, you will be a doctor,” his mother, Fatima Sayid, interjects.

In south Lebanon, young men who die fighting are hailed as heroes. With fighting all around them and living in displaced, children have few role models to follow or even an ability to visualize the future, says Marianne Abboud, a psychologist with the aid organization War Child in Lebanon.

Help for traumatized children

Abboud says for children in particular, being displaced and exposed to danger has a harmful developmental effect, including potential mental health issues.

“Children develop holistically — on the cognitive level, on the physical level and on the emotional level,” she says. War Child in Lebanon offers its own educational and music programs for children in conflict.

She said studies have shown that arts programs can be effective for children in war by helping them process and cope with feelings.

One study found that a program of structured activities, when combined with support for parents, led to a “considerable effect” in coping with behavior and emotional difficulties for some children. A program developed by War Child, Save the Children and UNICEFis based on games that emphasize movement and play-based learning.

“Children communicate through play, they communicate through activities,” Abboud says. “During these activities they are processing their emotions indirectly without having to talk about them.”

Istanbouli says he has seen a difference in the children from when they first start attending the arts program.

“We see at the beginning when they come they have a lot of stress … especially when they begin to speak about themselves” and what happened during the war,” he says. “Now we get to know them more and they really feel like family.”

On the bus that day, the children are overwhelmingly relaxed and seemingly happy, singing along to Lebanese icon Fairuz and standing up to see the view of the Mediterranean along the coastal road.

A dream and a bus

Istanbouli, who studied theater at Lebanese university, says he introduced the traveling bus in 2018 to screen films in villages across the country because movies are a universal language. He says that devoting a bus to peace is significant because it was an attack on a bus in 1975 that sparked Lebanon’s civil war.

“When you come to watch a film with someone you don’t know, you will not ask him about his name or his nationality or his religion,” he says. “You will share with him the moment — if something makes you feel happy you will laugh together, or you will feel sad together.”

TIRO also is finding new roles for movie theaters, renovating four historic facilities and turning them into art spaces open to everyone.

At the Rivoli Cinema in downtown Tyre, the younger children run upstairs for arts and crafts. An ebullient instructor hands out paper plates and crayons to turn into drawings of baskets of flowers — to remind the youngsters of the gardens and orchards surrounding their villages.

In the theater on the ground floor, with its fading velvet seats, Istanbouli gathers the older children onto the stage.

Rawan, one of the displaced young people, is 18. She doesn’t want her last name used because she says her mother would be angry at her for speaking publicly in this conservative society.

Suspended between her disrupted childhood and adulthood, she has finished high school and plans to go into teachers’ training next year.

In the theater, Istanbouli runs a lightning round of questions with the older children. ‘What’s your favorite color?’ he asks. ‘Your favorite food?’

The kids shout out answers. But when he gets to "when was the last time you were happy?" there is mostly silence.

Then they crank up the music and everyone gets up on stage to dance. Rawan, covered in an elegant black abaya, takes the hands of a little girl and dances with her.

Istanbouli says the drawing, acting, photography and theater classes are intended to allow the children to express themselves and release the pain they are holding.

The children say they miss ordinary things that most kids take for granted — the privacy of a room with a door that shuts, a real bed rather than a thin mattress on the floor, going to school, their bicycles and toys.

Aseel Ezzedine, who is 11, has been displaced for seven months and says she misses her cat.

“Honestly I don’t know anything about her,” she says. “Whether she died or is still alive or got burned from the strikes.”

Even at the school where they are staying, the children say they hear the sound of fighter jets and explosions.

“The doors shake. They start shaking and the window frame shakes and the clotheslines fall to the ground,” says Sarah Miliji, who is almost 12. “Then our hearts almost stop from fear and we run screaming for our mom.”

She says she tries hard to learn from remote lessons for her sixth grade classes but it’s difficult.

“We aren’t understanding anything from them,” she says. “Our families help us so we don’t fail because if we fail my mom will get upset and there is already the war and it would put a lot of pressure on her.”

After theater class, Houssam Khatab takes some of the older children out for photography lessons. He also drives the bus.

Khatab, 24, is a photographer who came to Lebanon as a Syrian refugee.

“The worst thing about being displaced isn’t being hungry or missing school,” he says. “It’s the way people look at you – with pity.”

There’s no pity here. For a couple of afternoons a week, just regular kids doing regular things.

Istanbouli says what Lebanon needs is to “connect each other through culture and arts.”

“This will help to build bridges and a new generation,” he says. “This is the future for Lebanon.”

But first, he says, the fighting has to stop.